Illicit Massage Parlors Are Across Massachusetts. Why Is Police ... - wgbh.org

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The debate about whether such sites are legal echoes a more public fight over Backpage.com, where thinly veiled advertisements for prostitution and erotic massage are easily found. Last year, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from three sex-trafficking victims in Massachusetts who accused the website of helping to facilitate the abuse and exploitation of children.

The decision left in place a lower court’s ruling that federal law protects websites from being held liable for content its users publish on the sites. Other efforts to go after Backpage have been thwarted by the federal Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms from liability.

Still, Sen. Robert Portman, a Republican from Ohio, and Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri, investigated the issue and determined Backpage.com knowingly facilitated sex trafficking. Last August, the lawmakers filed legislation meant to hold Backpage and other websites accountable by eliminating federal liability protection for websites proven to facilitate sex trafficking laws.

Backpage officials could not be reached for comment.

Prosecutors from Massachusetts to Minnesota detail cases where mostly foreign-born women work seven days a week, 12 to 24 hours a day, sleeping in parlors or nearby flop houses, and are managed by a network of interstate traffickers and business people.

In the Hadley sting, law enforcement found “makeshift sleeping quarters” in the house as well as two other facilities connected to operators. Some of the women said they’d never left the storefronts since starting work, court records show. Semen and sperm were found on doors, towels, walls, blankets and massage tables, court records show.

Now, Feng Ling Liu and Jian Song and their daughter Ting Ting Yin face charges of sex trafficking women from New York to Massachusetts, including at the Hadley Massage Parlor. All three have pleaded not guilty.

The Attorney General’s office has filed four massage-related cases since 2012 under the state’s anti-sex trafficking law, but it’s a slow process. So far only one has reached a conviction and in that case prosecutors withdrew the sex trafficking charge to settle with a lesser prostitution-related plea.

Many argue that, without reducing demand, the problem will never go away. Nationally, the illicit massage industry generates roughly $2.8 billion in revenue annually, according to a recent study by two academics from Texas Christian University. With that much money on the line, sex traffickers often find new locations as soon as one is shut down.

Some anti-trafficking advocates are using Rubmaps as a tool to fight the industry. In Houston, a nonprofit advocacy group called Children at Risk is using review data to identify apparent illicit parlors and recruit volunteer attorneys to seek to shut them down for lack of licensing records.

For Shandra Woworuntu, a 41-year-old human rights activist and sex trafficking survivor based in London, viewing Rubmaps was a shock. Woworuntu said that she had been aware of review sites, but hadn’t read comments until a reporter showed them to her.

Woworuntu, founder and director of the New York-based Mentari Human Trafficking Survivor Empowerment Program, said she still is recovering from her brutal enslavement in 2001 in brothels, massage parlors and hotels along the East Coast.

“This is so shameful,” said Woworuntu, referring to Rubmaps. “How about if that woman is their wife, their daughter?”

Phillip Martin is a senior reporter with WGBH News. Jenifer McKim is a reporter for the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news partner of WGBH News. This story was co-published with the Boston Globe.

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